Tag: Paine

April 30, 2006

“Tom Paine”

This book reads like the last gasp of the old guard Democratic staff weenies who think that soundbites (one for every issue in this book) and platitudes will make up for ineptness. This book, for example, proposes programs such as eliminating social security taxes for 94% of the workers and paying for everyone's college tuition, without in any way suggesting how the Federal budget might be balanced. There is, in short, no tax reform focused on eliminating subsidies and loopholes and corporate fraud combined with corporate exclusion from the tax base.

Sorry, but on balance, this book is very loosely thought through, and I personally resent anyone using Tom Paine's great name in vain.

The only thing in this book that I think is right on target (sure, the issue positions are acceptable, but any high schooler could have put this list together) is the emphasis on the need to get back in touch with American labor, support the unions, and restore the vitality (the opposite of disposability) of the American worker.

This books makes no mention of Matthew Miller's The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love or Rabbi Michael Lerner's The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right or any of a myriad of good books on Cultural Creatives, New Progressives, Ecological Economics, Immoral Captialism, etc.

Bottom line: YUK. The author gets the third star for good intentions, otherwise this would have a been a two star vote.

At 57 pages, this book is light-weight in every possible sense of the word. It does not achieve its objective. See the image I am loading, if Amazon works today, for an idea of a policy framework that can then be costed out.